Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bill Feingold.

Citrix Systems CTXS -0.25%, which did cloud computing before there was cloud computing, just issued a big convertible bond. The company got a great deal. If you’re surprised by that, you haven’t been paying attention. But it’s worth taking a minute to see how Citrix and companies like it are seizing on the opportunity provided by a historical imbalance between supply (low) and demand (high) for convertibles.

First of all, Citrix is a terrific company. If you do anything business-related online, you’ve probably used Citrix. Basically, Citrix’s products and services make small computers far more powerful, both by connecting them and by helping them compute more powerfully through “virtualization.” The remote-access service GoToMyPC, for instance, is under Citrix’ corporate umbrella…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Big data analytics are driving rapid growth of public cloud computing. Why? It solves real problems, delivers real value, and is pretty easy to implement on public clouds. Don’t take my word for it. Revenues for the top 50 public cloud providers shot up 47 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013, to $6.2 billion, according to Technology Business Research.

TBR’s latest figures reveal the extent to which public cloud providers are using big data to drive their own operations, get new customers, and expand features and functions. Although public cloud customers want storage and compute services, many implementing big data systems these days find that the public cloud is also the best and most cost-effective platform for big data…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Frederic Paul.

It’s been an amazingly busy period for the cloud computing industry. A multitude of powerful forces – both positive and negative – are simultaneously buffeting the industry, and their combined effects could dramatically affect the landscape for both consumer and enterprise users of cloud computing services. Let’s start at the beginning.

Cloud Cost Cuts

Late last month, Google sparked a cloud price war when it revamped its enterprise cloud services – including significant price cuts across its storage, compute and BigQuery analysis services. The cuts were designed to boost demand… and put new pressure on Amazon Web Services’ market-leading position…

Grazed from TheGeekStuff. Author: Editorial Staff.

What is a Cloud? Depending on who you are talking to, you’ll get different answers to this question. A technically savvy end-user might define cloud as the ability to store and access personal or business data on-demand, over the internet, without having to store it locally.

A business might define cloud as an IT infrastructure that can be rented on-demand, instead of purchasing IT equipment to run their enterprise business applications. A stakeholder might define cloud as a flexible execution environment of resources involving one or more stakeholders and providing a metered service at multiple levels up to a specified quality benchmark…

Grazed from Newser. Author: Ryan Nakashima.

In Satya Nadella’s first quarterly earnings release as chief executive, Microsoft Corp. on Thursday posted earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations, offering new justification for the CEO’s focus on cloud computing. Factoring out special items from a year ago, revenue in the January-March quarter grew 8 percent.

Nadella, who replaced longtime CEO Steve Ballmer in February, said in a statement that the quarter’s results "demonstrate the strength of our business, as well as the opportunities we see in a mobile-first, cloud-first world." Microsoft’s stock rose $1.09, or 2.7 percent, to $40.95 in after-hours trading after the results were released. That followed a 17-cent gain to $39.86 in the regular session…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Salesforce.com was so impressed by the Mayday customer support feature that Amazon.com rolled out for its Kindle Fire HDX tablets that it’s now working to create its own version. Mayday allows HDX users who find themselves stumped to simply touch a button and be connected to a support representative via video chat.

The upcoming Salesforce1 Service Cloud SOS provides an SDK (software development kit) that companies can use to embed a similar button into any native iOS or Android mobile application, said Larry Robinson, vice president of product management. Companies using SOS, however, would have to be subscribers to Salesforce’s Service Cloud customer-service software…

Grazed from Forrester. Author: James Staten.

The public cloud services market exited 2013 with $58 billion in revenues according to Forrester estimates. Strong growth and maturity over the past three years since our last forecast has put fuel in its tank which will push this market to $191 billion by 2020. While the last several years can best be characterized as exploratory for most enterprises, cloud services and cloud platforms are now an undeniable part of the IT landscape.

And based on Forrester enterprise CIO inquiries, the shift has begun from exploration of cloud as a potential option, to rationalization of cloud services within the overall IT portfolio. And this shift to the second stage of technology adoption yields significantly higher market revenues than the exploratory phase. Clearly the bulk of this market’s revenues come from Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions which accounted for $36 billion in revenue in 2013…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Alistair Barr and Anna Prior.

Amazon.com Inc. reported another quarter of skimpy profits as the Web-commerce giant spent heavily on shipping, cloud computing and newer initiatives that it hopes will keep revenue growing quickly. Amazon reported net income of $108 million, or 23 cents a share, compared with $82 million, or 18 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts were expecting a per-share profit of 23 cents, according to Thomson Reuters.

Sales increased 23% to $19.74 billion. Amazon in January had estimated sales would range between $18.2 billion and $19.9 billion. Analysts were expecting $19.43 billion. Operating expenses, meanwhile, rose 23% to $19.6 billion, and the company’s operating margin narrowed to 0.7% from 1.1% a year earlier…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sedar Yegulalp.

Never let it be said that Amazon is falling behind in cloud computing. The newest wrinkle with AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a twist on a long-standing technology, Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s application deployment and management system for all of its cloud services. Beanstalk has now been upgraded to support deploying and launching applications containerized through Docker.

Any Docker image can be deployed this way, whether from Docker’s public repository or from one’s own private store of containers. Users are left to create a .JSON file that describes the image to be used and a few other notations, and even that’s not mandatory because an existing Dockerfile, as they are called, will typically work as-is…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna, Ph.D.

Today, PernixData announces enhancements to PernixData FVP, its software-based storage solution for enabling dramatic improvements in the scale-out storage capability of IT infrastructures without the addition of hardware-based storage resources. In its initial rollout, PernixData FVP used hypervisor software to aggregate server side flash to create a “scale-out data tier for the acceleration of primary storage.”

The aggregation of server side flash creates a clustered acceleration tier that enables improvements in application latency and storage performance. The clustered acceleration tier empowers application administrators to optimize application performance without changing the workflows or raw storage capacity of the infrastructure in which the application is deployed…